Najem Wali is 70: refuge in the land of his favorite reading

Two years ago, Najem Wali named the book that sparked his love for German literature – and thus his entire life as a writer: Erich Maria Remarque’s “Time to Live, Time to Die”, published in 1954. Wali read the book in his Iraqi hometown of Basra, and in retrospect he scoffs that for him as a teenager, the title changed by the Arabic translator to “Time to Love, Time to Die” may have played a role. But above all, the novel, based in Berlin in 1944, taught him “that it is not enough to write war novels and to remind future generations what war means, what destruction means”. A few years later, Wali experienced exactly that in his homeland. After he had studied German literature in Baghdad out of enthusiasm for Remarque’s book and then completed compulsory military service, the war with Iran broke out in 1980, and Wali saw only one way to escape the foreseeable death at the front – millions died on both sides in the following eight years: He fled to the country, whose literature he knew after all, and he got to know it even better when he studied German in Hamburg. In the mid-1980s, Wali began writing himself, in Arabic, but he found his first audience in Germany. Since 1989, he has published numerous books: novels and social analyses of the Arab world. It took until 2024 before Wali felt able to write a novel in German, “City of Blades”. Probably his greatest success was the release of Boualem Sansal because he had long since become one of the most active authors in the local literary life, especially through his involvement in the German PEN Centre, whose program “Writers in Prison / Writers at Risk” is not to be overestimated in its importance. Wali knows from his own experience what he is dealing with, especially in the Arab world, and so he made the commitment to the Boualem Sansal imprisoned in Algeria a matter of heart. The release of Sansal was primarily attributed to an appeal by President Steinmeier to the Algerian President, but Wali pulled the strings in Germany. He is a pioneer of what should then be called migrant literature. When he came to Germany in 1980, hardly anyone was interested in the fate of immigrants; They should integrate, also literary and thus thematically. With the growth of the refugee flows, however, novels that tell of the experiences of Russian, Yugoslav or Arabic-born figures have become an essential part of German-speaking contemporary literature, because their authors have made their own experience and suffering literarily fruitful – like Wali. “How many coincidences must happen in a person’s life until his fate becomes visible,” Wali has recorded as an important reading impression from Remarque’s “Time to live, time to die”. The most important coincidence for himself was this reading. He himself writes and is committed to making such coincidences now possible for others. Tomorrow, Najem Wali will celebrate his seventieth birthday in his adopted hometown of Berlin.